Out of Pod Experience

Hey, you can combine the two of them, they aren't mutually exclusive. Consider that hydroponics uses electricity to drive its machinery as it stands, though thinking about it a tractor and all agricultural equipment could be converted if needed.

It's an infrastructure issue, and its a technology that works in a few circumstances but isn't yet practical to grow say wheat. And replace the farmland. However it does significantly drop off pesticide usage and a small (relatively) building could grow the worlds cinnamon supply, or a few other spices. We built an Empire for those spices, if we can grow them cheaply domestically, well

One final mention is that ultimately I feel there's just flat-out too many people to feed. And that's just going to get worse.

I just really get angry when I hear about these people having 6 kids. The Octo-Mom. All that. Also, that religion that discourages contraception especially in the poorest of countries. Talk about more self-defeating...............

No, but I would wager that today we have bottomed out what we can do to make it viable short of ripping down areas to make more arable land, or massive water projects to grow in the desert, which are rapidly draining aquifers. Same in the US where the Ogalalla Aquifer is being drained faster than it can produce, that's the water fuelling the prairies and when that thing runs out...

Well there's going to need to be a water treatment plant to make salt water into drinking water, and the infrastructure to pump it to the centre of the North American continent. That in itself will be a major engineering issue. Food prices have gone up and down as the stock markets have, its a commodity and the price can only go up with demand, forcing poor people to starve, riot, then you get the Arab Spring when the people are hungry.

GM could make it cheaper but its banned in the EU, the political position after we starved in WW2 is "never again" and we throw money at farmers to keep some land slack and overproduce so we don't starve again.

Everything humanity has ever achieved as a major scientific advancement has brought us to this point.

Get out a calculator, but in 7billion and multiply by 1.01, 1% annual growth. Within a matter of Aeons humanity composes all the matter of the universe, so at some point we will have to cut back unless we can pull fresh matter out of parallel Branes

My logic is perhaps naive, but here's how I see it. Asteroid mining gives us cheap building materials, which can be used to build Solar arrays, cheap power, and hydroponics farms on the planets as part of the Urban infrastructure, using the cheap energy and materials. Idealistic, yes. Worth going towards, I think its inevitable given a capitalist economy undergoing growth.

If we didn't have genetically modified food. We would only have enough food in the world to feed 1,5 billion people. So which 5,5 billion people are going to walk quietly into the night so the rest of us can eat inefficient organic food?


On top of that the organic crops are so weak that the farmers have to use a lot more pesticide than they normally would which makes the crops even worse for the environment and questionable to the consumer.

Naturally the worlds largest producer and exporter of organic food is China. Not that they eat it no. They just jack up the price and then sell it to hippies in the west so they can then eat "morally justified" food.

We will be alright. It's not like we will just go to the super market one day and find it empty of food.

As producing specific foods become more expensive the prices will change, innovation will be bought and paid for to produce the more valuable food, food prices will change and we will buy food accordingly.

1. Genetic engineering in itself is not a problem. Or at least not a huge and/nor irreversible problem.
We've been doing smaller-scale, slower-timed and less focused genetic engineering since way before the Egyptian pharaohs anyway, via strong artificial selection, hybridization and such.
Granted, the effects are more drastic and harder to see in modern times due to the pace of changes compared to a human lifespan, but still... meh.

2. Specific types of genetic engineering coupled with a certain recommended growing protocol (in particular specific herbicides and pesticides) however can potentially be a big problem.
Monsanto's protocols end up with food containing trace amounts of their (also patented) herbicides/pesticides, which, WHILE they may not DIRECTLY affect human tissue, they certainly do have a fairly high chance of some degree of indirect damage (for instance, one of those trace chemicals has been linked in fairly recent studies with "damage" to the human intestinal tract "gut flora", which can cause a number of unpleasant side-effects to the host body).

3. Monsanto may get what it likes in most places, but it's smashing its head against most old world bureaucracies and it hurts :P
http://www.dw.de/monsanto-gives-up-fight-for-gm-plants-in-europe/a-16851701

4. While it is true that "traditional" (read : "ancient") farming methods may not be able to feed anywhere near the current world population, you don't really need Monsanto-style protocols to do it either.
That is, if you're prepared to accept Matrix-ship-grub-gruel-like-foodstuffs (i.e. quite nutritional but bland and textureless), we already have the "technology" to feed not just the current population count, but several times more than that. Then again, who the heck really wants to eat algae-and-testtubemeat paste for most of their life if they can get fresh crunchy veggies and solid steaks ?
P.S. Ironically, the places on the globe where food is most of a problem (i.e. close to the equator) are the places where this "yucky yummy paste" would be most convenient to produce sustainably all year round.

and this is why I like to see Akita T's posts

yes but, any farmer worth their salt was taught to keep some seeds of the current harvest for next year's, weaker or not.

And this is why I agree with Grimpak.